Life forms 'went large' a billion years ago

[nitpicker]

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-36303051

Life forms 'went large' a billion years ago

By Paul Rincon
Science editor, BBC News website

9 hours ago

Life was already organising itself into large communities of cells more than a billion years ago, according to evidence from China. The centimetre-scale life forms were preserved in mudstones from the Yanshan area in the country's north and are dated to 1.56 billion years ago.

Fossils big enough to be seen by the naked eye became common between 635 and 541 million years ago. But the latest specimens are more than twice that age. The findings by a Chinese-American team of researchers appear in the journal Nature Communications.

The mysterious organisms from the Gaoyuzhuang rock formation appear to belong to the branch of life known as the eukaryotes, which today includes everything from single-celled amoebae to plants, fungi and animals.

The sea-dwelling life forms probably lived on the shelf areas of ancient oceans and bear a superficial resemblance to algae. They also appear to have used photosynthesis, the process by which plants, some bacteria and other simple organisms convert sunlight into chemical energy.

Prof Andrew Knoll, from Harvard University, a co-author of the paper, said the organism represented by the Chinese fossils was "large but I doubt that it was complicated - an important distinction". He told me: "You're a good example of a complex multi-cellular organism because you have 250 cell types, dozens of tissues, different organ systems. "On the other hand if you go to the beach you will find seaweeds that consist of a sheet of cells that are almost all identical. Most of them can either photosynthesise or be used for reproduction."
(snip)

"There are a couple of cases where we know the genomes of both unicellular (single-celled) organisms and their closest multi-cellular relatives. When the jump is from a single cell to simple multi-cellularity, there's very little difference in the gene content of the organism. That's a small leap forward. The difference when you go from simple multi-cellularity to complex multi-cellularity, however, is large. The tree of life suggests that has happened only rarely."
(snip)

[Peace Patriot]

1. It certainly boggles the mind to think of the time scales involved...

...both in the evolution of life forms, and in the evolution of stars, planetary systems, galaxies and galaxy clusters.

The universe has lots and lots and lots and lots and LOTS of time. Life, too, has lots and lots and lots of time. But we don't have lots of time. We just have a teensy bit of time in which to learn, contemplate and understand.

We also don't often do that--or can't do it--that is, learn, contemplate and understand. So much of our energy must go into simple maintenance of this life form that we happen to be. And so much of the society that we have developed is devoted to distracting us from learning, contemplation and understanding, whether it's the two shit pay jobs that millions of people must work at, simply to eat and feed their children, or the blaring TV and its brainwashing repetition of commercials and stupid ideas and stupid "shows," or the more subtle forms of propaganda and distraction--movies, major sports on TV, shopping malls, rock concerts, computer games, car races, gun shows, or even splendid orchestras, operas and dance troupes, or gallery shows.

I won't condemn it all. Some of the dumbest-seeming things can lead to learning and some of the dumbest-seeming people can surprise you with their understanding. And God knows we are a life form that loves to entertain each other. It seems to be in our DNA. A deep need. A deep compulsion. Maybe it has to do with our restless, big brains. Entertainment, as well as dreams at night, may keep them from short-circuiting.

But time. Time. We little sentient ants on our small, pretty globe don't have much time to figure things out--although we've done a pretty good job of figuring things out as a collective enterprise over many generations. Pythagoras would be very surprised by black holes.

[AuntPatsy]

2. Very interesting..

[MisterP]

3. it's like I always said, skeletal structures are a passing fad